Cutting the Cord: What Parents and Teenagers Need to Know

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CreditCreditNishant Choksi

By Judith Newman

Aug. 23, 2019

My 17-year-old is heading off to college. I’m about 50 percent sure he’ll be fine. The other 50 percent is convinced his corpse will be discovered under a pile of filthy laundry, charred beyond recognition because I wasn’t there to tell him not to put That Thing in Tin Foil That’s Too Old to Eat into the microwave. Alternatively, he will die from fright, having had to kill a bug on his own.

My worries have taken over my life. Which makes me like approximately every parent who’s sending their kid away right now. I can’t tell if this is a very good time or a very bad time to be reading books on “adulting” — those skills we all need to make it in this world — but read them I must. Deep breaths.

According to U.S. News & World Report, roughly 30 percent of college students in the United States drop out after the first year; whether the problem is academic, social, financial or psychological, this is an alarming statistic. Two recent books hope you, or your kid, won’t become that statistic. HOW TO COLLEGE: What to Know Before You Go (and When You’re There) (St. Martin’s, paper, $16.99), by Andrea Malkin Brenner and Lara Hope Schwartz, is geared toward the student; COUNTDOWN TO COLLEGE: The Essential Steps to Your Child’s Successful Launch (Ballantine, paper, $17), by Monique Rinere, is for the anxious parent.

Both are solid primers, but “How to College” reads more like a textbook, with suggestions that are spot on yet not always realistic. (My son is as likely to introduce himself to his professors before classes as he is to accompany me to a Stephen Sondheim festival. Which is to say, not at all.)

Rinere, herself a first-generation college student, was an administrator at Princeton, Harvard and Columbia; she’s also an adept teacher, entertaining us with other people’s tales of triumph and woe. She does a particularly good job of looking at worst-case scenarios. What if your child gets in nowhere? What if your child refuses to sign the FERPA form? And what the hell is a FERPA form? (Everyone knows that medical information for people over 18 is private, but so are a young adult’s grades … unless he or she signs a waiver. Wonder what that waiver is going to cost me.)

We’re all trained to think about how our kids are going to deal with drinking and drugs at school, but Rinere raises a less-discussed but still critical subject: What about those kids who are trying to break with the past and want to go off prescribed medication? Without hijacking the focus on your child, Rinere also tackles some of the questions parents are asking about themselves — with the emphasis on diving more enthusiastically back into your own life, especially your work life, given the bills you may be facing. It’s not just your kid who has to think about the future.

Do you want to learn your geopolitics from the same people who teach you how to keep your necklaces from tangling when you travel? Then, unquestionably, HOW TO SKIMM YOUR LIFE (Ballantine, $27), by Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg, the women behind the popular newsletter theSkimm, is for you. That newsletter describes itself as “a membership company dedicated to helping female millennials live smarter lives,” a task it seemingly accomplishes by offering tips about functioning adult behavior in no discernible order. Instructions on how to pair wine with food and how to clean your toilet are in adjacent chapters. Still, both are valuable skills. So while the book’s organization may be a bit random, the information itself is often valid and amusingly packaged.

I do think, however, there’s some information it’s safe to know just a teeny bit about, and some that requires more depth. For instance, this is how theSkimm summarizes foreign interference in the 2016 election: “Then it came out that Russian hackers had attempted to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election in favor of President Trump. Cue an investigation into whether people on Team Trump colluded with Russia. The investigation found no evidence of collusion.”

Well, not really! Sometimes it helps to know the difference between “no evidence” and “not provable in a court of law.” This is why the Mueller Report isn’t the kind of thing you want to “skimm.” On the bright side, though, I now know how to fold a fitted sheet and why not to recycle a pizza box. So thanks, ladies.

In BROKE MILLENNIAL TAKES ON INVESTING: A Beginner’s Guide to Leveling Up Your Money (TarcherPerigee, paper, $15), Erin Lowry says her book is for rookies, and it is. She breaks down the who/what/when, explains how it’s (almost) never too early to start and shows you when it’s O.K. to begin. (Hint: It’s fine to have school loans, but don’t start thinking about investing until you have a three-to-six-month expense cushion and have paid off your credit card debt.) She offers clear discussions of everything from individual stock picking to impact investing to the benefits of investing even when you’re risk averse.

I’d argue that this book isn’t just for millennials. Those of us who were lucky enough to have had investments set up by our families or financial professionals don’t necessarily understand what we’re doing either. Before I, an old person, could even read the book, I needed to head to the chapter that defined investing terms. This made me realize that for 20 years, every time my portfolio manager tried to educate me, burbling on about expense ratios or R.O.I.s, I would go to my happy place, which either involved a golden retriever at the beach or me and Gerard Butler naked. Either way, it didn’t improve my investing literacy. “Broke Millennial” did.

All this time spent reading books on adulting can be harrowing for a worried parent who isn’t entirely sold on the survival skills of her teenage son. I needed some reassurance, and a sense of “this too shall pass.” Luckily, I found it with a king penguin, a hyena, a humpback whale and a wolf.

In WILDHOOD: The Epic Journey From Adolescence to Adulthood in Humans and Other Animals (Scribner, $28), Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers, whose previous book was “Zoobiquity,” follow this cast of characters as they face the trials of making it to adulthood in their savage and competitive worlds. You don’t even need to anthropomorphize to find some of the similarities between animal and human teenagers uncanny, and the lessons they have to learn remarkably similar. Take, for instance, the need to recruit adult attention in order to succeed. Natterson-Horotize and Bowers tell a story about a low-status adolescent hyena getting the highest-status adult to protect and nurture him — in a world where a high-status hyena (or, as I think of her, the Lori Loughlin of hyenas) would normally make sure her own offspring win out, even if they don’t deserve to. Isn’t this the skill we all want for our kids?

There’s one adulting lesson here that I particularly cherish. Among Spanish imperial eagles, if a fledgling is hanging around the nest too long, formerly nurturing parents will start with tiny acts of aggression (decreased feeding, ignoring their begging) and end up divebombing their offspring — digging their talons into their soft flesh and more or less forcing them to get the hell out. Zoologists have come up with a very scientific phrase for this: “parental meanness.” The eagles who practice parental meanness apparently raise more successful fledglings than their more indulgent counterparts.

Message received.

Judith Newman is the author of “To Siri With Love: A Mother, Her Autistic Son and the Kindness of Machines.”